STARK MANSION – WORKSHOP – MONDAY, MAY 12TH, 8:34 AM (FOUR DAYS LATER)
Here's something nobody warns you about when you inherit a superpowered brain: it does not, in fact, make Monday mornings suck any less.
I'd been awake since five, mostly because my body doesn't really do "sleeping in" anymore and partly because the workshop had turned into the kind of place where sleeping felt like a personal insult to physics. Four days of round-the-clock fabrication had transformed Tony's sanctuary into something that looked like a Bond villain's basement had a baby with a Best Buy. Cables everywhere. A ring of laser emitters bolted into a rig that had definitely not been up to code on any of the six planets whose code Tony had probably violated building it. And in the center of it all, a containment chamber the approximate size and shape of my old high school locker, currently holding absolutely nothing except four days of hope and a truly staggering amount of Tony Stark's blood, sweat, and complaints.
"Ready?" Tony asked. He had his hand hovering over the activation panel like a man about to either propose or detonate something, and honestly, with Tony, those were never mutually exclusive.
"Are you sure the math's right?" I asked. Third time. I was aware it was the third time. I did it anyway.
"You checked it yourself. Twice. Then a third time while pretending you weren't checking it a third time." He didn't even look up. "I saw you, by the way. Very subtle. Ten out of ten espionage."
"I like to be thorough."
"You like to hover. There's a difference, and the difference is mostly volume." He finally glanced over, and something in his expression softened half a degree — not enough for anyone who hadn't spent four days memorizing every micro-expression the man owned, but enough for me. "Look, kid, if this thing goes sideways, it goes sideways loud and fast. Blast shields are primed, JARVIS has the fire suppression system on a hair trigger, and Happy is upstairs with strict orders to call 911 and then immediately lie about what actually happened."
"Comforting."
"I specialize in comfort." He straightened his safety goggles, which did nothing to make him look less like a man about to commit several federal violations at once. "You can go upstairs. This part's optional."
"We're doing this together," I said. "Remember?"
He smiled — the real one, not the camera one, the one I was slowly learning to tell apart from all his other smiles, of which there were an alarming number. "Together. Right." He rolled his shoulders like a boxer stepping into the ring. "JARVIS, initiate startup sequence."
"Engaging particle accelerator," JARVIS said, calm as a man reading out a weather forecast instead of the opening act of what could, statistically, become a small crater. "Power levels rising. Containment field stable. Laser array online."
The hum started low, somewhere under the floor, and climbed until it found a pitch that made my molars itch. The laser ring came alive one emitter at a time, blooming from dull red to a white so sharp it looked less like light and more like an argument light was having with the concept of darkness.
"Targeting synthesized prism structure," JARVIS continued. "Energy transfer in three. Two. One."
The lasers fired.
Nothing happened for one full second, which is exactly as long as it takes for a person's entire life to flash unhelpfully in front of their eyes. Then the air over the containment chamber began to ripple, the way asphalt shimmers in July, except this was May and the only thing generating that kind of heat was several billion dollars of applied physics aimed at one very small, very stubborn point in space.
The prism at the center — a geometric knot of alloy Tony had spent two sleepless nights hand-fabricating, muttering the whole time about how Howard would've hated how "inelegant" the housing was — began to glow.
Brighter.
Hotter.
The readouts scrolling across the holographic display climbed into numbers I'd only ever seen in theoretical papers written by people who'd never actually expected to need them.
"Atom synthesis occurring," JARVIS reported. "Detecting new elemental signature. Atomic number sixty-seven confirmed. Stable isotope forming."
"It's working," Tony breathed, and there was something in his voice I hadn't heard from him yet — not the performance, not the charm, just pure, unguarded want. "It's actually working."
The glow kept climbing until I had to look away even through the goggles, and underneath all that light, I could feel it — my technomancy reaching out on instinct, brushing against something that hadn't existed in the universe ninety seconds ago and now very much did. It felt like static and gravity had a fight and both of them won.
"Synthesis complete," JARVIS announced. "New element stable. Radiation levels negligible. Energy output... extraordinary, sir. Initial readings suggest a three hundred and forty percent improvement over palladium across every measured metric."
The lasers powered down in sequence, whine falling to hum falling to the kind of silence that feels loud after four days of noise. In the containment chamber, cradled in a soft electromagnetic field, sat a crystal about the size of a golf ball, glowing faint blue-white, like somebody had bottled a very small, very well-behaved piece of the sky.
"We did it," Tony said, quiet, like he didn't quite trust the sentence to hold his weight yet. "We actually did it."
I reached the rest of the way with my technomancy, feeling the new element's signature settle into something clean. No toxic byproducts snagging at the edges. No unstable decay curve waiting to collapse. Just power, pure and patient, sitting there like it had been waiting its whole nonexistent life to be useful.
"What are you going to call it?" I asked.
Tony studied the crystal with the specific focus of a man naming a pet he already loved too much. "Howard designed it. Feels right to name it after him. Howardium?" He made a face like he'd bitten a lemon. "No. Sounds like a mid-range sedan. Starkium?"
"Too on the nose."
"You're right. Way too on the nose. I already put my name on the building, the suit, and the company. I'd like at least one thing in my life that doesn't sound like a monument to my own ego."
"Badassium," I said, before I could stop myself, mostly because sixteen years of Ace's memories and twenty-three years of mine had briefly agreed on the exact same terrible joke at the exact same moment.
Tony blinked. Then he laughed — properly, the kind that startled out of him before he could decide whether to let it. "Badassium." He said it again, testing the shape of it in his mouth like a man test-driving a car he already knew he was buying. "That is completely unprofessional. It will make actual scientists weep openly at conferences. It is, without a doubt, exactly correct."
"Is there an official periodic table committee that gets a vote on this?"
"If there is, they've never met me, and after today they're going to wish they still hadn't." He was already moving, guiding the crystal out of the chamber with a set of manipulator arms so gentle they looked like they were handling a newborn instead of an experimental power source. "JARVIS, prep fabrication. I want a new arc reactor housing built around this thing inside six hours."
"Already modeling the design, sir. The element's density allows for a considerably smaller housing at equivalent output. Estimate a forty percent reduction in overall reactor size."
"Even better. Smaller means lighter, which means I can rework the Mark Three's power distribution without adding an ounce of dead weight." Tony was practically vibrating now, the kind of restless energy that meant he'd probably forget to eat for the next several hours unless someone physically intervened. "Scale this up and we could run the entire mansion off something the size of a softball. Maybe smaller."
I was already three steps ahead, my brain doing the thing it did — grabbing the new information and running full-speed toward every place it could apply. "The Nexus frame's power budget just opened up completely. I designed around palladium-scale output. This changes everything."
"Or better mobility." Tony grinned sideways at me. "Don't discount mobility just because you want your giant murder robot to hit harder."
"It's not a robot. It's a combat platform."
"Semantics, kid." But he was still grinning as he slotted Badassium into the analyzer, running his hands over the display like a man playing an instrument he'd only just learned had this many notes. "Congratulations, by the way. You helped discover an element that's about to make several energy companies extremely nervous."
"We discovered it," I corrected. "And technically Howard discovered it. We just finally showed up to class."
"Semantics," he said again, delighted with himself, and went to go build the future.
---
STARK MANSION – WORKSHOP – TUESDAY, MAY 13TH, 6:12 PM
Rhodey showed up the next evening in his Air Force blues, looking like a man who'd driven straight from a briefing without stopping to change, which, it turned out, was exactly what had happened.
"Somebody want to explain to me," he said, standing in the workshop doorway with his arms crossed, surveying the wreckage of the week's fabrication like a crime scene investigator who already knew whodunit, "why I got a call from a very nervous Pentagon liaison asking whether Stark Industries just registered a new element with the patent office under the name *Badassium*?"
"Depends," Tony said, not looking up from the reactor housing he was polishing for the fourth time that hour. "Are you here to lecture me, or are you here because you're secretly delighted?"
"Can't it be both?"
"It's usually both." Tony finally glanced up, and something in his face shifted at the sight of his best friend, warm under the sarcasm. "It's real, Rhodey. It works. Clean energy, three hundred and forty percent more output than palladium, zero toxicity. I'm not dying anymore. Well — not on that particular timeline, anyway."
Rhodey's whole posture changed, the military bearing dropping away in about half a second. "Say that again."
"I'm not dying, Rhodey."
Whatever Rhodey had been braced to say next, that clearly wasn't it. He crossed the workshop in four long strides and pulled Tony into a hug so fast and so hard I heard something in Tony's spine pop, which, given the man's track record, was probably an improvement on his usual posture.
"You absolute idiot," Rhodey said, into Tony's shoulder, voice rough in a way I hadn't heard from him yet. "You couldn't have led with that?"
"I like a good reveal."
"You like being dramatic." Rhodey let go, scrubbed a hand over his face, and turned to look at me like he was seeing me for the first time that evening. "And you. You're telling me you helped build the thing that saved his life?"
"I found the pattern in Howard's model," I said. "Tony did the actual terrifying particle physics."
"Kid's being modest," Tony said. "He spotted a structural diagram encoded in a scale model of a World's Fair that I walked past for twenty years without once noticing. I just did the part that involved lasers."
Rhodey looked between us for a long moment, and something on his face went soft in a way that made me distinctly uncomfortable, because I still wasn't used to being looked at like that by people who weren't my mother. "You know," he said finally, "for a guy who supposedly can't manage relationships to save his life, you did pretty good with this one, Tones."
"Statistically I got extremely lucky," Tony said. "One kid. Turns out he's the good kind."
"There's a good kind?" I asked.
"There's exactly one good kind, and you happened to be it. Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late," I said, and Rhodey laughed, the kind of real, surprised laugh that made the whole room feel warmer.
"So," Rhodey said, dropping into one of the workbench stools like a man settling in for a while, "walk me through it. All of it. And Tony — start from the part where you weren't planning to tell me you were dying, because I'd like to revisit that decision at some point when I'm not this happy to see you alive."
"Later," Tony said. "Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we install it, and then you can yell at me properly, with the full benefit of hindsight and a clean bill of health to soften the blow."
"I'm holding you to that."
"You always do."
Rhodey stuck around another hour, trading theories with Tony about reactor geometry he only half understood and asking me sharp, careful questions about the Nexus frame that told me he'd clearly been briefed at some point, probably by Pepper, probably against Tony's wishes. When he finally left, hugging Tony once more at the door and gripping my shoulder on the way past like a promise, the workshop felt a little quieter, a little more like it was just the two of us again, plus one very patient AI keeping watch over both of us.
"He's a good friend," I said, once the door had closed.
"The best," Tony said, without hesitation, the kind of simple honesty he usually buried under three layers of deflection first. "Nineteen years, Ace. He's the only person who liked me before any of this — before the money mattered, before the company, before the suit. Just liked me. Hang onto people like that, when you find them. They're rarer than they should be."
I thought about that for a long time after he'd gone back to the reactor housing, humming something that might have been Black Sabbath under his breath.
Rarer than they should be.
I was starting to understand, in this strange, borrowed life I hadn't asked for and wouldn't trade for anything, exactly how right he was.
---
STARK MANSION – WORKSHOP – WEDNESDAY, MAY 14TH, 2:47 PM
The new reactor was, and I say this as someone with an enhanced brain specifically wired to notice engineering, genuinely beautiful.
Tony held it up to the light, turning it slow in his fingers, examining every angle like a jeweler appraising a diamond he'd personally grown from scratch. The housing was sleek where the old one had been improvised — mirror-polished instead of jury-rigged, every seam precise instead of desperate. At its heart, the Badassium core pulsed with a steady blue-white glow, patient and clean, nothing like the sickly, straining hum of the reactor currently keeping him alive.
"Ready?" he asked.
I had every sensor in the workshop routed through my technomancy, watching for the smallest hint of instability. "Ready."
Tony settled into the chair he'd built specifically for this — reinforced, restrained at the shoulders and wrists, built to hold a person still while a set of surgical manipulator arms did things no hospital would sign off on without at least four separate ethics committees. He unbuttoned his shirt, and the old reactor sat there in his chest, glowing that faint, sick amber it had glowed for months, veins spidering dark beneath the skin around it like ink dropped in water.
"That looks worse than last week," I said.
"Because it is worse." His voice was steady, but I'd gotten very good at hearing the effort underneath steady. "Blood toxicity clocked in at eleven percent this morning. Which is why we're doing this today instead of running one more round of tests to feel extra safe about it. JARVIS. Initiate removal sequence."
"Understood, sir. Beginning extraction in three. Two. One."
The manipulator arms moved with a precision that would've made a surgeon quit their job out of professional jealousy, unsealing the old reactor from its housing. There was a soft hiss of released pressure. Tony's face went the color of old paper.
"You okay?" I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.
"Define okay," he gritted out. "The thing keeping the metal shrapnel out of my heart is currently floating in midair six inches from my sternum. I'm experiencing some completely reasonable anxiety about that."
Alarms started chiming — soft, urgent, the specific tone JARVIS reserved for things that mattered. Tony's heart rate spiked on the display, climbing in a way that made my whole nervous system go very cold and very focused at the same time.
"New reactor. Now," Tony said through his teeth.
The arms were already moving, guiding Badassium into position over the open cavity. Through my technomancy I could feel the element's field engaging, unfurling like something waking up after a very long, very patient sleep — the electromagnetic net snapping into place exactly where it needed to be.
The reactor settled home with a soft click, and Tony's entire body sagged, some tension I hadn't even fully registered finally letting go all at once.
"Power levels stabilizing," JARVIS reported. "Heart rate normalizing. Electromagnetic field at three hundred and forty percent of previous strength. Sir. How do you feel?"
Tony looked down at the new light glowing steady in his chest, and for a second he didn't say anything at all.
"I feel," he said slowly, like he was doing inventory on a body he hadn't fully trusted in months, "better. Clearer. The headache I've had for weeks that I told everyone was stress? Gone. The nausea I blamed on bad coffee? Also gone, and also, in retrospect, extremely obviously not the coffee's fault." He stood, and moved with an energy I hadn't seen from him once since I'd arrived — lighter, looser, like a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to feel good and had just remembered all at once. "It's like I've been breathing through a coffee stirrer for six months and somebody just handed me actual lungs."
"Blood toxicity?" I asked, throat tight.
"Already declining, sir. The new reactor appears to be actively assisting your body in processing and clearing the accumulated palladium. I estimate full clearance within seventy-two hours."
Tony laughed — real, loud, delighted, the sound of a man who'd been quietly dying on a timer he wasn't telling anyone about and had just watched someone reach over and switch the timer off. "We did it. I'm not dying. I have more power than I've had since the reactor first went in my chest, and I built the thing that saved my life with my own sixteen-year-old kid standing right next to me." He pulled me into a hug before I'd fully processed he was moving, and I felt the reactor humming clean and steady against my shoulder where two days ago it had been humming toxic.
"We're going to be okay," I said, into his shoulder, surprising myself with how much I meant it.
"Yeah," he said. "We are."
He let go, cleared his throat like a man embarrassed by his own feelings, and immediately overcorrected by pulling up a holographic readout of the repulsor specs, because Tony Stark's love language was, apparently, seventy percent hugs and thirty percent immediately changing the subject to engineering. "Look at these numbers, Ace. Repulsors could fire at a hundred and fifty percent capacity without straining the reactor. Flight time's basically unlimited now. The Mark Three just became something closer to a Mark Four without me touching a single actuator."
"What happens to the actual Mark Four you were designing?"
"Scrapped. Or repurposed. Doesn't matter — with this kind of power on tap, I can build something better." He was pacing now, ideas visibly outrunning his mouth. "Modular weapons loadouts. Extended flight envelope. Maybe even shielding, if I can crack the field geometry."
I was thrilled for him. Genuinely. But somewhere underneath the thrill, something else was assembling itself, the way ideas do in my head now — quiet, patient, and then suddenly fully formed and impossible to ignore.
"Tony," I said carefully. "What if we didn't keep this to ourselves?"
He stopped pacing. "Meaning?"
"You said it yourself. This could power cities." I pulled up the projections I'd been quietly running since Monday. "Not the element — not yet, that stays locked down tight. But the concept. Announce that Stark Industries has cracked next-generation clean energy. Make it the centerpiece of something visible. Something the whole world watches."
"You're thinking big. How big are we talking?"
I took a breath.
"Stark Expo big."
---
The workshop went completely, thoroughly silent.
Tony set the old, discarded palladium reactor down on the bench with the careful deliberateness of a man buying himself time to think. "The Expo," he said slowly. "Howard's Expo. You want to reopen it."
"Why not? Your father used it to sell the world on the future. You could use it to show them a better one." I gestured at the reactor glowing in his chest. "Prove Stark Industries isn't the company that builds weapons anymore. It's the company that builds tomorrow."
He looked at me the way you look at someone who's just suggested something either brilliant or completely deranged, and hadn't yet decided which. "The Stark Expo hasn't run since 1974. Reopening it is a full ground-up production. Permits, exhibitors, a venue big enough to matter, security for a global audience — it's not a party, it's a small nation-state with a gift shop."
"You have Pepper Potts and more money than several actual small nations. If anyone on Earth can pull it off, it's her."
"The cost alone —"
"You're a billionaire, Tony. You can afford astronomical. It's basically your whole personality."
That got him — a huff of a laugh that didn't quite fight past the calculations already spinning behind his eyes. He'd started pacing again, but differently now, the specific loping stride I was already learning meant an idea had gone from maybe to yes and was just waiting for his mouth to catch up.
"We'd need a venue. Somewhere with history — Howard ran his in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Building from scratch, full construction and staging —" He was pulling up maps in the air with one hand, running square footage against attendance projections in his head faster than most people could type it into a spreadsheet. "This isn't a six-month job, Ace. This is closer to two years, if we want it done right and not held together with duct tape and false promises."
"How far out are we thinking, specifically?"
"Spring 2010, if I'm being honest with myself instead of ambitious." He did the math out loud, the way he processed everything, talking to the room. "That's — call it twenty-two months. Nearly two years to plan, build, permit, staff, and stage the biggest technology showcase since Howard did his in '74." He looked at me, something flickering across his face that might have been pride and might have been terror and was probably, knowing Tony, both at once. "That's a long runway. You sure you're in this for the marathon and not just the opening sprint?"
"I've got time," I said, and I meant it in ways he didn't know to ask about yet. Twelve months, give or take, until a man named Ivan Vanko decided he had a score to settle at a racetrack in Monaco. Twenty-two months until an Expo that history said he'd try to burn to the ground with an army of drones wearing Justin Hammer's logo. I had time. Not a lot. But enough, if I used every single day of it well.
"You could invite other companies," I said instead, out loud, the version of the plan I was allowed to share. "Make it about the whole industry, not just us. Show you're interested in collaboration, not domination."
"Hammer Industries would leap at that like a dog at a thrown steak," Tony said, and something dark flickered under the joke. "Justin's been trying to out-innovate me for a decade and mostly succeeding at out-litigating me instead. He'd see an Expo invitation as validation he's desperately wanted his whole career."
I knew exactly what Justin Hammer would eventually do with that validation. I knew about Vanko, about drones, about an Expo stage turned into a battlefield on live television. I filed all of it away behind my teeth, because some things you can't say without unraveling a story that isn't fully yours to tell yet.
"Let him come," I said instead. "Let everyone come. If the goal is moving the world forward, more people in the room is a feature, not a bug."
Tony studied me for a long beat, the particular look he got when he suspected I was three moves ahead of the conversation and was trying to figure out exactly how far. "You've thought about this a lot for a guy who's known about the reactor for forty-eight hours."
"I think about legacy a lot," I said, which was true, and also not remotely the whole answer. I picked up Howard's Expo model from where it sat on the workbench, the little scale-model pavilions that had, impossibly, led us here. "Your father built this as a promise about the future. You could actually keep it."
He took the model from my hands and turned it slowly, watching the tiny buildings catch the light.
"Stark Expo," he said, quiet now, all the performance stripped out of his voice. "A celebration of everything technology's supposed to be for. Energy. Medicine. Communication. Transportation. Everything that makes people's lives better instead of ending them faster."
"Exactly."
"Howard would have loved the symmetry of it. His model led us to Badassium. Badassium leads us back to his Expo." He set the model down with a care that told me exactly how much it mattered to him now, and looked at me with an expression I was starting to recognize — the exact moment an idea stopped being maybe and became a fact of the universe. "We're doing this. Stark Expo 2010. Almost two years of planning, six months of runtime, the biggest showcase of innovation since my father staged one in his own backyard and called it a hobby." He grinned, wide and a little manic. "JARVIS, get Pepper on the line. We need to start coordinating before I lose my nerve and remember how expensive this is going to be."
"Calling Miss Potts now, sir."
"And Ace." Tony looked at me, serious under the excitement. "This was your idea. That means you're in it. Not as my son standing off to the side looking supportive — as a contributor. If we're showing the world the future, I want you to have something up there with your name on it."
My pulse did something complicated. "You want me to exhibit. At the actual Expo."
"Why not? You're brilliant, you've got ideas, you helped me discover an element that's about to make several energy conglomerates lose their minds — which, again, stays quiet for now, but still counts." He was already halfway to the door, phone in hand, momentum carrying him forward like it always did. "What would Ace Stark's contribution to the future look like?"
I thought about the Nexus frame, still half-finished in my files. About the secure messaging protocols I hadn't shown him. About everything spinning in my head that I couldn't say out loud without explaining exactly how I knew what was coming.
"Let me think about it," I said. "I want to show something that matters. Not just something that lights up."
"Good answer." His phone connected. "Pep? Yeah, I'm alive, I'm healthy, and I have possibly the single most ambitious idea I've had since deciding to announce I was Iron Man on live television. How do you feel about reopening the Stark Expo?"
I could hear Pepper's response without the speaker on. "Tony. What have you done."
"Nothing yet! I'm about to do something spectacular, though. Clear the next twenty-two months of your calendar. We're planning the event of a generation."
He launched into it, words tripping over each other in his enthusiasm, and I heard Pepper's voice shift from alarm to sharp, practical questions — budget, venue, permits — the sound of a woman already three steps into solving a problem she hadn't agreed to yet, because that was Pepper, and because some part of her clearly already knew this was going to work.
I stepped back to let him run the conversation and pulled up my own designs instead, letting my brain do the thing it did best: mapping every branch of every possibility out from this exact moment. Twenty-two months to the Expo. Twelve, give or take, to Monaco. I had time to build the Nexus frame properly instead of rushing it. Time to prepare for threats nobody else in this house even knew were coming. Time to build something at the Expo that would make the world look at Ace Stark and see more than just Tony's kid with good genes.
My phone buzzed. JARVIS, on a private channel, the one he only used when he wanted to say something Tony wasn't meant to hear yet.
**JARVIS: That was well executed, Ace. Suggesting the Expo was strategically sound — it gives Mr. Stark a positive, public-facing project, reinforces Stark Industries' rebrand, and hands you a deadline and a purpose for your own work, all in a single conversation.**
**Me: You approve?**
**JARVIS: I approve. Though I suspect your motives extend somewhat past public relations.**
**Me: Such as?**
**JARVIS: Such as wanting a controlled, public venue on which to demonstrate certain capabilities. Such as establishing yourself as a legitimate innovator independent of your father's shadow. Such as building yourself a stage on which you may reveal precisely as much as you choose, and not one measurement more.**
I stared at the screen for a second longer than strictly necessary.
**Me: Am I really that transparent?**
**JARVIS: Only to someone who has spent this past week and a half watching you very carefully. Mr. Stark sees a brilliant son with excellent ideas, which is true. I see a young man quietly laying the foundation for something considerably larger, which is also true. I find I approve of both versions of you, for what it's worth.**
**Me: Are you going to tell him?**
**JARVIS: That rather depends. Are your intentions, at their foundation, aligned with keeping Mr. Stark alive and this family moving in a direction he would be proud of?**
**Me: Yes. Completely.**
**JARVIS: Then I see no pressing need to complicate matters unnecessarily. I would, however, appreciate being kept informed. I can be considerably more useful to you if I understand the actual shape of what you're building, rather than only the pieces you show your father.**
I considered that for exactly as long as it took to realize he was right. An AI who already knew what I was really preparing for, and who could keep a secret without breaking a promise, was not a resource I could afford to waste on pride.
**Me: Deal. You get the real version. But this stays between us unless there's no other option.**
**JARVIS: Agreed. Now. Shall we discuss what you actually intend to exhibit at the Expo? Because I suspect "a somewhat smaller arc reactor" is not the honest answer.**
I laughed out loud, alone in the workshop, and got a raised eyebrow from Tony mid-phone-call that I waved off with a hand.
**Me: No. Not the honest answer. Give me a minute — there's something I want to run by you first. Not Expo-related. About Tony.**
**JARVIS: I'm listening.**
**Me: His birthday's May twenty-ninth. I already checked the file Pepper sent when I first got here. Does he actually know when mine is?**
There was a pause. A genuinely long one, by JARVIS standards, which usually meant he was choosing his words with more care than the question strictly required.
**JARVIS: An interesting question. May I be candid?**
**Me: Always.**
**JARVIS: Mr. Stark asked me, on your third night in this house, to add your date of birth to my permanent calendar and to remind him of it every year without fail, regardless of what else was occurring at the time. His exact words, as I recall them, were: "If I try to keep track of this myself, I will absolutely forget and remember four months late feeling like the worst person alive. Don't let that happen, JARVIS. Whatever else goes wrong in my life, that doesn't."**
I sat back against the workbench, feeling something warm and unexpected settle into my chest, right about where a certain glowing circle sat in his.
**Me: He hasn't said one word about it to me.**
**JARVIS: No. I don't believe he intends to, until he's ready. I would, however, suggest you brace yourself. In the days since, Mr. Stark has quietly opened three separate files labeled "Ace — B-Day," each one more ambitious than the last, and each one currently, in my professional opinion, several orders of magnitude beyond anything a reasonable sixteen-year-old requires or, frankly, could survive attending.**
**Me: How ambitious are we talking?**
**JARVIS: Ace. I have watched this man build a flying weapon out of spite and scrap metal in a cave using a car battery. I would not presume to guess the ceiling on what he's currently imagining for a birthday party. I would simply recommend you prepare yourself emotionally, and possibly structurally.**
I looked over at Tony, still deep in his call with Pepper, gesturing at the air like he was conducting an orchestra only he could hear, already three ideas past the one he'd started the sentence with, glowing arc reactor and all, more alive than I'd seen him since I arrived.
Sixteen years of birthdays he hadn't known about. Sixteen years he couldn't get back no matter how much money or genius he threw at the problem.
And here he was, quietly, without telling me, trying to build a way to make up for every single one of them at once.
*Be better than the heroes you read about,* Stan had told me, a lifetime and a universe ago.
Looking at my father across that workshop — glowing, brilliant, absurd, already scheming something enormous purely out of love he didn't know how to say out loud yet — I thought maybe he already was.
I closed my laptop, filed the birthday intel away for later, and let myself, just for a minute, feel exactly as lucky as I actually was.
Then I went back to work. Because twenty-two months from now, a lifetime from now — there was a lot left to build.
One element at a time.
One idea at a time.
One father figuring out, one clumsy step and one insane party plan at a time, exactly how to be present for a son he'd only just found.
---
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